Last Updated on June 23, 2023
Atlassian Corporation Plc is a software company founded in 2002 that develops products for software developers, project managers and other software development teams. It employs over 7,000 people and is headquartered in Sydney, Australia.
Atlassian produces a range of proprietary software including software for collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. Atlassian dominates several markets where it still has intense competition.
Broadly speaking, they offer software in three large buckets: These are software development tools; help desk software, or IT service management; and workflow management software. When you think of Atlassian, think project management and collaboration tools.
Many of their programs use a number of open source components. And their GitHub repositories hold lots of open source code. But their main range of software is proprietary. This series looks at free and open source alternatives to Atlassian’s products.
Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service. Bitbucket Server is proprietary software. It is available for no charge for for use by official non-profit organizations, charities, and open-source projects, but not governmental, academic or religious organizations.
What are the best free and open source alternatives?
1. GitLab
GitLab, like GitHub, offers version-control distributed git platforms used for storing your code inside git repositories.
GitLab is essentially a comprehensive DevOps platform. It has a mature built-in CI/CD framework, the combined practices of continuous integration and either continuous delivery or continuous deployment. Combine that with code and project management tools, issue reporting, and more, it makes it easy to manage, plan, create, verify, package, secure, release, configure, monitor and defend projects.
Self-host GitLab on your own servers, in a container, or on a cloud provider.
GitLab is published under an open source license.
2. Gitolite
We’re big fans of self-hosting. And storing your code inside your own locally hosted git repository makes a lot of sense. Make sure your backup strategy is sound!
We are also big fans of Gitolite. It lets you setup git hosting on a central server, with fine-grained access control and many more powerful features. Manage a Git server with Git.
While you’ll need to learn how to use Gitolite, this involves simple editing of text files in a Git repository. And the project’s documentation is excellent.
3. Gitea
We also love Gitea as a self-hosted Git service. This is a community managed lightweight code hosting solution written in Go. It aims to offer the simplest way to set up a self-hosted Git service.
Gitea is cross-platform, easy to install, lightweight and published under an open source license (MIT).
4. Gogs
If Gitolite or Gitea don’t float your boat, we also recommend Gogs. It shares many similarities with Gitea (Gitea is a fork of Gogs).
All articles in this series:
| Alternatives to Atlassian's Products | |
|---|---|
 | Bamboo is a continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) tool that ties automated builds, tests, and releases in a single workflow. |
| Bitbucket is a Git-based source code repository hosting service. Bitbucket Server is a combination Git server and web interface product written in Java and built with Apache Maven. |
 | Confluence is a web-based corporate wiki written in Java. It’s billed as a remote-friendly team workspace where knowledge and collaboration meet. |
 | Jira is an issue tracking product that offers bug tracking and agile project management. The software provides a wide range of extensions and integrations. |
 | Jira Service Management offers an IT service management (ITSM) solution offering request management, incident management problem management and more. |
 | Opsgenie is a modern incident management platform that ensures critical incidents are never missed, and actions are taken by the right people promptly. |
 | Sourcetree is a Git client that simplifies how you interact with your Git repositories so you can focus on coding. |
 | Statuspage brings companies and customers together during downtime with incident communication. |
 | Trello is a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application. The software is developed by Trello Enterprise, a subsidiary of Atlassian. |